In a nod to the National Football League’s ever-expanding Hispanic fan base, CBS announced that ESPN Deportes would present the official Spanish-language simultaneous broadcast of Super Bowl 50 on February 7. According to Advertising Age , this marks the first time a Disney-owned TV outlet will carry a live Super Bowl feed since ABC hosted its seventh and final broadcast 10 years ago. The move is a result of CBS’s lack of a Spanish-language cable network of its own. Fox gave the Super Bowl the first full Spanish-language Super Bowl simulcast in February 2014 with a parallel feed on Fox Deportes that averaged 561,000 viewers, while NBC Universal leveraged last winter’s Patriots-Seahawks game as a launch vehicle for NBC Universo. The NBC Universo telecast averaged 368,000 total viewers, which works out to about 0.3% of the 114.4 million fans who tuned into NBC’s flagship broadcast.

Super Bowl 50 only will be the third NFL title tilt to get the full simultaneous broadcast treatment. ESPN Deportes reaches 5.3 million Hispanic households, or 45% of all U.S. Hispanic cable homes. The standalone channel simulcasts regular-season “Monday Night Football” games. While Deportes reps did not immediately respond to inquiries about the deal terms it is likely that the majority of the advertisers represented in CBS’s Super Bowl broadcast also will appear in the Spanishlanguage feed. How the final creative will shake out is anyone’s guess. Last year, roughly two of every three spots that aired in the Universo simulcast targeted Spanish speakers.

This story first appeared in the blog, The Sport Intern. The editor is Karl-Heinz Huba of Lorsch, Germany. He can be reached at ISMG@aol.com. The article is reprinted here with permission of Huba.

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